fine whine

Without a doubt, Batman begins is the best movie I've watched this year.

Boy, that joke never gets old*.

It's very well done, and puts most, if not all, of the recent superhero films to shame. Chris Nolan and David Goyer spare us many of the conventions the previous incarnations have inflicted on the moviegoing public: the delightful but hokey 'POW' 'BAFF' and 'ZOWIE's that lent the '60s TV series its camp and charm, overly gothic Gothams, plastic nipples, blacklit and neon-clad street gangs, K-car police cruisers, ridiculous villains and pithy one-liners, and Danny DeVito. Gotham resembles a normal city, albeit with more shadows and a train system redolent of art deco and the so-called Silver Age of comics art. But plausibly so. Could it be a subtle dig at Spiderman 2 with its elevated train action sequence? Probably not.

The effects work is top notch, with only minor missteps in with swooping swarms of bats and scary, shaky POV effects shots, but in each case they get the job done. The miniatures work with the new Batmobile is exemplary, and the entire chase sequence is equally cool and engaging. The characters are interesting and believable, and the actors portraying them do a fine job doing so.

That said, I have some minor quibbles. Batman's voice sounds a bit odd at times, as though in persona he's taken up a carton-a-day smoking habit or is deliberately trying to sound tougher. Or maybe the Gotham air's more abrasive the faster you breathe it, and he probably takes in his share of bugs and airborne particles whilst swooping through the streets. At least he talks out the front of his mouth. Katie Holmes, on the other hand, doesn't. She's apparently always been inflicted with this odd sideways-speaking bit, and it's only the more distracting when she's got those big closeups. I don't recall seeing it in Go and wherever else, but this is also the biggest role I've seen her undertake so far.

Gary Oldman, on the other hand, speaks like, well, a native, however one of them is supposed to sound.

And then there's Michael Caine. I realize that there are few British actors available for the Alfred role (Michael Gambon and Patrick Stewart being the first two I would name, followed by Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen) but couldn't he have been coached to sound a little more, oh, Jeeves-like**? He's got his same accent from Goldmember and The Italian job and even The man who would be king, and I can't imagine Alfred ever uttering "I figger..." the way Charlie Croker or Peachy Carnehan would 've. Michael Gough certainly never did, and as the one stable feature of the previous recent features he had always performed admirably.

I am, of course, overlooking the fact that Christian Bale is, in fact, Welsh.

Based on what I know of his preparation for other movies with eleven or twelve letter names (The Machinist and Equilibrium), I don't doubt that he brushed up on his close combat skills, effort that is all but wasted due to the incredibly quick editing of most of the fight scenes. Nolan's a relative newcomer to action (more than was in Memento, at least), but if they let him helm the inevitable sequels, I'm sure he can only get even better.

I'm certainly looking forward to seeing him try.

* Just like the "Remember, you're [whatever]ing for two," with which I chide my pregnant co-worker, about once a day. Comic hilarity every time.

** Having recently watched some of Jeeves and Wooster and re-watched Gosford park I think I can recognize the stereotypical British butler/valet/manservant diction. Stephen Fry, of course, isn't nearly old enough for the role, but he could've helped Michael knock out some of the cockney here and there, I'd think.

That honor goes to High tension, or as it is known in its native France, Haute tension.

Vive la difference.

Anyone watching it expecting to see something different would likely end up as I did, disappointed and annoyed. At the risk of giving too much away, it's about a woman who brings her friend (who fantasizes about her...) home to meet her family at their country home, and the carnage that begins when a large stranger appears and doesn't let up until the last few moments of the film.

I suppose it's a technical achievement in this day and age of CGI effects to have a film supposedly done all in-camera with splattery, gory fake blood, but that really just makes it a stunt, not something necessarily worth watching. If I were a fan of the genre, I might call it a refreshing return to form, or a sentimental slasher or even some sort of retro masterpiece, except that it's no masterpiece.

Against my better judgement, I'm not going to ruin the ending* but failing that, I don't have much else to say about this movie. It's stylish, but I can't help but see parallels to other movies. The most prominent, though undoubtedly the least intended, is the whole spooky truck bit which seems to be lifted from Jeepers creepers, except that it was a major (driving) force in the plot in that film, and here it fulfills a throwaway cliché, the car chase that would be requisite if it were an action movie. I suppose the slasher genre has its car chases, but I don't recall much gore in Bullitt or (either) Gone in 60 seconds.

Going back, I only have one unanswered question that doesn't make sense (beyond the normal suspension of belief) but I'm not really interested in watching it again to see the subtleties. There are dead people, but this is no Sixth sense.

* Lots of people get killed, in gory fashion, and then, before it's over, there's a twist. Or did I just give it all away?

So now it's 2006. Our plans fell through, and Jessica and the cat abandoned me so I rang in this year by myself (well, I suppose the people apparently detonating small explosives count too since they sounded awfully close).

Which isn't that big of a deal, anyway. It's just another night; one that divides the days dates are written with a twelve at the beginning and one number at the end*, and then dates with a one at the beginning and that old number plus one at the end. Big deal. I write about ten checks a year.

I watch a lot of movies, though, and tonight was no exception. First in the lineup was the 1976 Bad news Bears and, even though it maybe wasn't an out-of-the-park home run, it wasn't just a caught pop fly.

Enough with the baseball terminology. Thankfully the movie doesn't dwell in it, instead focusing on some well-played kids (even if they can't play the game all that well) and a surprisingly good Walter Matthau. He's an actor that has turned in many a good role (Hopscotch is one of the more underrated gems of the Criterion Collection) and here as a casual alcoholic he's just as good as ever. His changes of heart may be a bit sudden, but never as jarring as they might otherwise be in the hands of someone else. The kids, though, prove to be just as much up to the task, including an impressive Tatum O'Neal (who, in doing nothing impressive after Paper moon, may have been cast as the 'old pro' brought in to help out the amateurs in something of a canny, if unintended move), though many a fair-haired buck-toothed boy gets mixed up with another. The movie stands apart from other underdog movies for many a reason, and most make it worth watching. I may check out the remake sometime, just to see what seasoned vets like Richard Linklater and Billy Bob Thornton can do with the same material, but I'm in no hurry. This one's good enough.

To end the year on a more serious note, I next watched Woody Allen's Hannah and her sisters. This wasn't the first time I'd grabbed it at the library; I'd often checked it out but had lighter fare to watch first, or just wanted something less, well, less about three sisters and their romantic entanglements in New York City. But in Woody Allen's hands it's not nearly as bad as something sounding like that could be.

After all, imagine Nora Ephron tackling the same idea. Or don't.

The way Allen writes it it's touching, clever, intelligent and funny, and well worth watching. Almost every character is convincingly fleshed out, and Woody's neurotic nebbish has rarely been more believable. Michael Caine is a bit creepy as an adulterous husband, and it's difficult to pin down if he's playing an American or Brit or someone from somewhere else, for all that matters. In the end it's not about where everybody came from, but where they end up and how they get there that matters, and everybody, Woody and Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest and Sam Waterston and Michael Caine and Max Von Sydow (whose severe artist criticizes TV at one point, his comments no less timely now than they were then; the title of this post is a quote from the scene) and Carrie Fisher and all the rest make for a great movie about love and families and everything in between.

I split my viewing of it, however, to catch the yearly ball-dropping in Times Square. I'm no longer certain why I do this other than to know the correct moment the year turns, since my watches and clocks are all different. I don't care about the people on TV, don't watch the flavor-of-the-month performances and interviews before and after the drop, and don't want to think about all of the garbage littering the Square after the millions file out.

They mentioned that a literal ton (2000 pounds) of confetti was to be thrown on the crowd, they with their big balloons and streamers and promotional hats and stupid, stupid, stupid '2006' glasses, and I could see the few empty inches of pavement behind the announcers (somehow I ended up seeing Carson Daly instead of Dick Clark. The new year came anyway) already covered in garbage even before the climactic last moments.

And for what? Some of those people had been standing around since noon, and that's not even considering the travel time that most of them, out-of-towners, also endured. And without public restrooms, apparently. So they came all that way, and waited all that time, and they couldn't give a crap.

Har har. Happy New Year, for what it's worth.

* I refer, of course, to the dreadful 'month day, year' notation that has so caught Americans' fancy. Why, oh why, ask I, can't we use the much nicer, more logical 'day month year' that so much of the rest of the world uses?

War of the worlds may have been ripe for remaking, but this year's attempt wasn't a worthy successor to the 1955 award-winner. It wasn't even as good of a movie.

It wasn't the worst movie we watched tonight, but it's definitely among the top three. The other two were Dead presidents and Benny & Joon. That last one was least worst of the bunch, but by no means a fantastic film.

Compared to the other two, though, it was fine art.

Some bits of it are pure brilliance. The idea of a poker game with non-monetary bets and raises is quite well done, in no small part due to the great cast. The way Sam makes mashed potatoes and grilled cheese are classic scenes, too, though nothing in comparison to Johnny Depp's Buster Keaton work. Aidan Quinn is just creepy, though, and far outshined by everyone else on screen. The screen is a bit muddled by the cinematographer's choice of filters and whatnot for the lenses: most of the movie is shot through a mesh (basically a pair of nylons) and the higher-fidelity of the DVD presentation makes that practice all the more visible and distracting.

More distracting, though, was the first four-fifths of Dead presidents, which resembled more The deer hunter than the heist movie that the commercials I remembered would have me believe. Chris Tucker shows that he can, in fact, act without being completely annoying, but little else is all that noteworthy. I much preferred Chris Rock's serious turn* in New Jack city when I watched that last week. But not by much.

* As opposed to every other role he's apparently ever played (save maybe for CB4, which I haven't seen), such as Dogma which I also recently re-watched.